CFP: The Semiotics of Nation Branding

Posted on March 8, 2014 by hellenic-semiotics

The Semiotics of Nation Branding: Toward an Analysis of Post-Nationalism?
Supplementary Issue of Signs and Society (University of Chicago Press), Winter 2016
Call date: June 1, 2014
Guest editor: Alfonso Del Percio (University of St. Gallen)
In modernism, nationalism provided the condition of possibility for the hegemonization of industrial
capitalism. Late capitalism, however, has dramatically affected the way governments (and other
economic actors) invest in the production of discourses on the nation and its identity. In this politicaleconomic environment, capital, products, individuals, and semiotic resources circulate across
national economies. No longer restricted to specific national locations, production and consumption
change according to the needs, interests and desires of the markets and its actors; and a new form
of a transnational market has emerged, bringing states and their territories into competition. In this
post-national framework, the competitiveness of nation-states is dependent on their distinctiveness in
the international markets, and so governments invest in the branding of their difference. Sociocultural ideologies of the nation facilitate a discursive construction of a nation-state as unique,
special, and desirable.
This promotional investment in nationalism needs to be understood in the framework of a
governmental practice generally called nation branding. This is a marketing strategy aiming to
discursively transform a nation into a commodity that can be branded, thereby successfully
positioning it within the international markets. As such, nation branding is a metasemiotic practice
that creates value in forgingthrough the staging of semiotic resources that index an ideology of
national identityaffective meaning (feelings of exoticism, internationalism, integrity etc.), which a
branding discourse then projects onto the promoted nation.
This supplementary issue will analyze ways in which semiotic resources (such as texts, images,
symbols, cultural artifacts, flags, songs etc.) enable the staging of a nation in the context of such
branding practices. We especially invite papers discussing which semiotic resources used to index a
nation are considered to be appropriate, and for which markets. Further, papers will investigate how
the image of a nation is invented, controlled, and enacted in these processes and will examine who
(individuals, communities, institutions) is legitimatized to brand a nation in a certain way and for
whom. This supplementary issue will discuss the methodological implications and challenges posed
when analyzing branding practices, especially in terms of how we, as analysts, can grasp the
production, circulation, and consumption of nation branding practices across time and space. How
can we analyze the decontextualization, entextualization, and recontextualization of modernist

discourses on the nation in a post-national political-economic context? Finally, with that in mind, this
issue will explore how and under which conditions such post-national branding discourses have
consequences on the (re)imagination of nationhood and on the relations of difference and inequality
implied.
If you wish to contribute to this supplementary issue of Signs and Society, please submit an abstract
of 500 words, with a full title and list of key references, to Alfonso Del Percio
at alfonso.delperciogmail.com no later than June 1, 2014.
For general questions about Signs and Society please contact the Editor-in-Chief, Richard J.
Parmentier atrparmentierbrandeis.edu.
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